This is the last release in the 2.x series. The current Long Term Release (LTR) remains version 2.14.x.
This release provides incremental improvements over our previous release.
The majority of activity is currently focussed towards the development of QGIS 3.0
which is our next generation release planned for the end of the first quarter of 2017.

Thanks

We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so). From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!

QGIS is supported by donors and sponsors. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our donors list. If you would like to become and official project sponsor, please visit our sponsorship page for details. Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts. A complete list of current sponsors is provided below - our very great thank you to all of our sponsors!

QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it - in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is - we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.

Annually we also receive support from various organisations who appreciate the
work we do and would like to facilitate the sustained development effort that
goes into the project. These sponsors are listed below with our thanks!

In QGIS 2.18 you can now scroll the mouse wheel over any of the sliders within the color picker dialog to increment the value by small amounts.
This is a handy shortcut for small tweaks to color components.

QGIS 2.18 adds the ability for users to set whether a user created color scheme should show up in the color button drop-down menus. This setting is controlled through the color picker dialog, on the lists tab. Just add a new color scheme, then from the scheme menu tick the new “show in buttons” option. It’s a handy shortcut if you have sets of common palettes and want them to be instantly available through the color menu.

In QGIS 2.18 clicking a color button inside the layer style panel causes the color picker dialog to be opened inside the style panel itself rather than as a separate dialog. This allows for interactive modification of colors with immediate preview of the result.

In previous versions of QGIS, users had to wait until download of all tiles of a layer has finished in order to view the resulting map. This has now been fixed and the tiles show up in map canvas immediately as they get downloaded, improving the user experience by greatly lowering the time until something is shown. Moreover, previously downloaded tiles from lower or higher resolutions may be used for the preview functionality in the areas where the tiles with correct resolution have not been downloaded yet.

This enhancement improves user experience when working with raster layers coming from remote servers. Previously one would need to wait until downloads are fully complete in order to be able to zoom or pan the map again, because the user interface would stay frozen in the meanwhile. This is now fixed by the fact that the rendering of raster layers can be cancelled any time.

The offline editing plugins is a default plugin that ships with QGIS and allows you to offline a remote dataset (e.g. from a database), edit it in the field, and then resynchonise it when you get back to your office. This extends the offline editing possibilities to only work on subset of large layers.

Allows an expression to be set for a vector layer field which is used to evaluate a default value for this field. Default value expressions can utilise properties of the feature which exist at the time of calling, such as digitized geometries. Expression variables can also be used in default value expressions, making it easy to eg insert a user’s name, the current datetime, project path, etc.

QGIS 2.18 adds support for orienting north arrows in the composer to True North. Previously all arrows were aligned to grid north, which is unsuitable for polar regions or non-north up projections (such as some South African projection systems). Now, you can choose to orient arrows to either grid north or true north. There’s also an optional offset angle, which can be used to specify a grid convergence to make your arrows orient to magnetic north!

This new algorithm is similar to the centroids algorithm, but where a centroid may fall outside its corresponding feature the ‘Point on surface’ algorithm is guaranteed to create a point which is inside the corresponding polygon feature (or touching the corresponding line feature for line layers).

This algorithm joins all the connected parts of MultiLineString geometries into single LineString geometries. If any parts of the input MultiLineString geometries are not connected, the resultant geometry will be a MultiLineString containing any lines which could be merged and any non-connected line parts.

This new algorithm returns the closure of the combinatorial boundary of the input geometries (ie the topological boundary of the geometry). For instance, a polygon geometry will have a boundary consisting of the linestrings for each ring in the polygon, and a line geometry will have a boundary consisting of the start and end points of the line. This algorithm is only valid for polygon or line layers.

Raster tiles in XYZ format are now natively supported within WMS data providers, allowing users to display basemaps from other sources without requiring third-party plugins like QuickMapServices or OpenLayers anymore.

To add connections to XYZ layers, just open browser dock widget, look for item called “Tile Server (XYZ)” and right click it to get a popup menu with “New connection” action. You will be asked for URL, in which {x}, {y}, {z} will be replaced by the actual tile numbers according to the current map view. For example, to add OpenStreetMap base map, one may use this URL:

http://c.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

The data provider also supports encoding of XYZ tile numbers into “quadkeys” used by Bing. Simply use {q} instead of {x}, {y} and {z} in the URL.

QgsExpressionLineEdit - includes a line edit for entering expressions together with a button to open the expression creation dialog. This widget is designed for use in contexts where no layer fields are available for use in an expression and space is constrained.

QgsTabWidget - similar to QTabWidget but with additional methods to temporarily hide/show tabs